New Changes to Twitch Game Directory

We’ve recently made a few design changes to the Twitch game directories that will help promote highlighted content, as well as encourage broadcasters to cut videos of their greatest moments. You can see these changes for yourself by clicking over to anygamedirectoryonTwitch.

By default, you’ll now land on the overview directory, which provides you with a look at not only the most popular live channels for that game, but the most watched archived videos for the week as well. From here, you can click over to view only live Twitch channels, or dig deeper into the highlights in the video-only directory.

This enhanced focus on highlights doubles-down on some of the changes we made back in March, as we want broadcasters’ greatest moments to continue to live on after the live show is over. This is slowly rolling out across the site, so don’t panic if you’re not seeing the new directory just yet. As always, let us know what you think!

The fast and the furious. It’s both a terrible movie and a perfect way to describe the pace at which our engineers...

zomgzerg

Now you can’t see what game are the Followed channels playing.

Why are you so obsessed with this highlight thing? most broadcasters will never do it, and some viewers just wanna look up their last broadcasts which is now hidden away and may even be removed at some point when you ditch the old design

http://jaredrea.com Jared Rea

The box art missing on the Following channels is a bug that occurred when we rolled this out. It’ll be fixed shortly.

The increased emphasis on highlights is to encourage broadcasters to put their best content forward and help increase their viewership. Prior to these changes, VOD views were extremely low across the board, primarily because presenting viewers with 4-6 chunks of something they already missed anyway simply isn’t a good experience. How do they know what to look for? Why should they even be watching this?

We don’t want viewers to think of Twitch content — the content that broadcasters produce thousands of hours of per day — as disposable. It takes a lot of time and effort to put on a live stream, and so it’s in everyone’s best interest that we find new and better ways to ensure that all those fantastic moments aren’t lost to the nether of broadcast archives.

butterbetterbatter

Do the streamers still receive ad revenue from views on their highlights or anything from their VOD?

http://twitter.com/FuzzyOtterBalls Justin Wong

Yes

http://twitter.com/kur1 Christopher Bral

That’s because the system to hunt down and chop out highlighted content on a lengthy stream is terrible. Better than the old system, but still terrible.

The whole system on Twitch leaves a lot to be desired. For example:
– The “I skipped ahead a few minutes, but now the whole video is rebuffering” annoyance
– Things are chopped into 2.5 hour segments with some interesting content being at that 2.5-hour mark.
– The sometimes-horrendously-slow loading bar for VOD videos
– The fact Twitch is a ton better (or, rather, a ton more known for) at indexing livestreams and nobody searches out content via the Searchbar. The content effectively doesn’t exist.

Want to make people view Highlights? Make a better system. Some ideas:
– Put an overlay a’la YouTube towards a “VIEW THIS!” highlighted video over the top of their streams / in their info sections
– You’re programmers for godsakes, have a better algorithm for videos that pop up on pages beyond just viewcounts (i.e. time up vs. views vs. likes all influencing what gets boosted). That said, allow people to sort via viewcounts too.
– Incentivize people to highlight things by offering more ad revenue for highlight views vs. livestream views.

Stop rolling out these barely-implemented features. It really isn’t making you look good. :<

http://twitter.com/LixBugz LixBugz

Thank you Mr. Bral.

Helza

Please provide an option to disabled this new feature or atleast change the default, i like to switch streams but keep wondering where stream X went, before i realise i’m seeing vod’s again and have to press the “live” tab again :/ it really happens alot and im really not interested in watching vods i want to see live streams.

http://www.facebook.com/tranderas Stephen Sarow

So instead of seeing streams with less viewers on the bottom of the page, people will instead see popular highlights? This seems to discourage newcomers to enter into streaming by making it harder for them to be noticed. I come to your live stream site because I want to see live streams. Youtube and Vimeo exist for the kind of content you’re promoting.

http://www.twitch.tv/paulscelus PaulScelus

Incorrect. If you check out the top right corner of “Live Channels” and “Videos of this week”, they each have a “View all” button. You can still view all live channels OR view all videos of the week.

http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100000822027035 David Hakki

No he’s still correct, instead of instantly seeing those lower viewed channels, you will have to press a button. Logically speaking ya that’s barely any effort, but it does make a difference believe it or not. Twitch viewers are lazy, and that can make the difference. Stephen is right.

http://www.twitch.tv/paulscelus PaulScelus

David and Tom: You both obviously haven’t been to the Directory page very often before this change. You still had to click “Load More” the lower down you scrolled. Clicking “View all” only adds 1 extra click. FailFish

http://twitter.com/LixBugz LixBugz

The point they are making is that it’s going to greatly (and it will be greatly) decrease the number of people who see the channels with fewer viewers. People will be even more inclined to just click on one of the first few streams rather than look further to see what’s out there.

Chris Roberts

Exactly, one thing that’s obvious on the internet is peoples laziness. Yes there is of course a “View all” button but why would the average user bother to use it when they can just click one of the shown channels immediately?. Veteran users like myself will use it, newcomers will not, therefore it is a problem that should be addressed.

http://www.twitch.tv/paulscelus PaulScelus

Lix and Chris: I can see that this is never going to become a topic of agreement so let me just say this and be done with it- If someone wants to specifically check out channels with lower viewer counts (and I have doneso with a friend and sent them heaps of support for no reason at all), then they’re going to deliberately go looking for smaller channels. To enforce that point: Whether you’re able to scroll lower or click a “View More” button, at that point the only reason you did that and essentially end up that low on the list of anything (not just Twitch listings) is because you made the directed and conscious effort to go there in the first place by your own mind and decision, not because you felt like pressing buttons or scrolling your mouse wheel randomly on that specific page of all pages.

The only thing promoting smaller channels in the end is people’s desire to go and see what smaller channels are streaming. Other than that, it has nothing (in my opinion, and logically as much as you’d like to say it isn’t) to do with the fact that you can’t see them from the top of the page. No matter how it’s set out, the user will ALWAYS have to make a conscious effort to go looking for smaller streams.

http://www.facebook.com/tom.mcdonald.399 Tom McDonald

It defaults showing both and blocks the casts with a smaller audience. Less welcoming for newer casters who already get the least support from twitch. Promote 1000+ viewer streams, Hide 10 or less viewer streams. I remember when front page wasn’t designed to only support already successful casts.

http://www.facebook.com/Irreparable Ray Laboy

Still wanting a feature to search by game genre.

Emrendil Tar-Emrendil

I agree.

213Edu

“Nurse akali cosplay”

http://twitter.com/LogicXpro Logic

This design is just way to confusing for new people looking for channels and even harder for new streamers to get viewers. Sorry but twitch has been very disappointing with these new designs lately. I wish they would listen to the community much more then they do now.

p.s – One simple way to fix this would be to make the stream the default page.

This is fine I guess, but too much screen real-estate at the top of the page is taken up with the options. This is fine on my desktop with a mega screen etc, but on my laptop I see too much navigation and text at the top. I can see several ways to fix this, but I am sure you can too.

Second, like the ‘responsive’ design, but the non-standard scroll bar is too thin. Again not a problem on my main computer (especially with a scroll wheel) but with a mouse pad it can be a pain. There is also a bug in that sometimes it does not appear – I found it reappears if I resize the browser.

http://twitter.com/RockBi Rock Bi

I didn’t need overview b4, now or never, make this one extra step for us to see what we came here for. *FailFish*

Nevada

Doesn’t matter what we want, that’s painfully obvious. First this ‘crap’ theme that still has the WHITE HAZE on the background which no one likes, Markdown which is a horrible replacement for HTML that no one likes, and zero customization with the rest of the page so everyones info area LOOKS THE SAME. We bitched up a storm, they said they are listening we still got no changes for the better.

Now they funnel people into more popular streams, and funnel people into the most popular VOD’s to further exclude newcomers. Frankly speaking, it wouldnt be so bad if they didn’t hide half the streamers online. Like putting them in a floating frame that is scrollable and shows all of them, then below like the 4 popular VOD’s in another frame static to the bottom. Would have saved that ‘Extra Click’ thus saving some bandwidth and still allowing everyone to view all followed online streams.

But I don’t know why suggesting things, it’ll be dismissed. Why should there even be comments on these pages?

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